Finding Arthur (44 page)

A few feet from the ninth tee is a large, raised, flat area that was once a Roman Fort and which the golfers use as a practice ground because it is a protected archaeological site. I only climbed up to this Roman Fort to get a better view of the remains of the sixth-century fort near the ninth tee, but I was soon distracted by the Roman Fort itself. It was enormous, more than 1,200 feet from north to south. Standing at its northwest corner, I could see that it was now cut in two by a railway line and that much of its southern end lay under the factory buildings of an industrial estate and a gas station.

Trying to get my historical bearings, I looked at my maps and the ground in front of me, while, at the same time, trying to picture the way things had looked at the time of the Romans. I wondered what would have remained of this Roman Fort for Arthur to see almost two hundred years after the legions left. Then I remembered something and pictured land that was twisted and crooked beyond the norm. I realized I had found the battlefield of Camlann.

According to modern archaeological records, “The Roman forts at Camelon have suffered from the construction of a railway, foundries and cultivation so that virtually no remains may be seen on the surface.”
¹¹
In the late sixteenth century, when George Buchanan visited Camelon, there was more to be seen: “Only a few years before this was written remains of the ditches and walls … were visible; nor even yet are the walls so completely destroyed, or the vestiges so indistinct, as not to be traced in many places.”
¹²

In 1697 an anonymous letter-writer who had visited Camelon described, “Vestiges of two large squares of 600 feet each … and a ditch and a rampart around each square.”
¹³
These Roman ditches, still visible in the seventeenth century, would have been very much more evident to Arthur, more than a thousand years earlier.

The “Plan of the Roman Station at Camelon, Stirlingshire, 1899”
¹⁴
shows a system of four giant trenches and ridges on the southern approach to the fort, created by the greatest military engineers the world has ever seen. This trench-ridge system was more
than eight hundred feet from side to side and two hundred feet from front to back. In its day, and I do not doubt shortly thereafter when Arthur was active, this trench-ridge system would have looked like a section of a colossal ploughed field. It is now lost under the car park of Alexander Dennis Ltd., Glasgow Road, Falkirk; in the sixth century it must have been a remarkable, memorable feature in the landscape.

Nothing in nature could have created such twisted, crooked land; this was land that was remarkably, memorably twisted and crooked, far beyond even the Scottish norm. This, I was sure, was the twisted or crooked land that gave Arthur’s last battle its name, the battle of the twisted or crooked land, the Battle of Camlann.
¹⁵

The rim of the raised platform of the Roman fort and what remained of the ramparts that lay at the edge of the trench system would have been an obvious place for Arthur’s men to form their shield wall. An attacking force would have had to approach them over unnaturally rough ground, down and up, down and up, down and up, down and up, four times before they could close with Arthur’s defenders.

Camelon had always made sense as a sixth-century battlefield because of its place on the wild border country that separated Arthur’s father’s Manau from Mordred’s Gododdin lands. As regards Arthur specifically, there was evidence that Camelon was Camlann in local tradition and in all the nearby places that had Arthurian associations. Of course, there was also the fact that Camelon and Camlann plainly and simply just sounded so very much alike.

I could have argued my Camelon-Camlann case with confidence on the strength of this evidence alone, but until I found the trench-ridge system of the Roman Fort and the meaning of the battle-name Camlann, I could not have comfortably claimed my evidence was conclusive. Now I can. Now I say the above evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that Camelon was Camlann.

When first I came to this conclusion, I did not know that there was other, entirely separate, evidence that led to the same end by a separate way. The battle-name Camlann perfectly describes the crooked, twisted land formed by the trench and ridge defensive system of the Roman Fort of Camelon, Falkirk, as it would have been in the late sixth
century of Arthur Mac Aedan and for a thousand and more years thereafter. This twisted, crooked land was not only there at the right time, it was also in the right place: the east lands of Manau, where Arthur Mac Aedan’s father was Chief.

The southern references to the legendary Arthur, in the
Annales Cambriae
and in the works of Geoffrey and of Malory, had led me to Camlann, and Camlann had led me to Camelon, Falkirk, where I had found the exact site of Arthur’s last battle. It all made sense.

However, although I believed I had proved my case for Camlann-Camelon, I looked at the evidence again but this time, not from a southern perspective—that is, with reference to the legendary Arthur—but from a northern perspective—that is, with reference to Arthur Mac Aedan.

I went first to the
Irish Annals
that tell of the late sixth century, a time when Irish and Scots were all but synonymous, and found in the
Annals of Tigernach
that Arthur Mac Aedan died in the year 594. This was two years earlier than I believe he died, but the
Annals of Tigernach
also say that Columba died in 593, when in fact Columba died on Sunday, June 9, 597, and so I was not too concerned about 594.

The
Tigernach
entry reads, “The violent deaths of the sons of Aedan, Bran and Domangart and Eochaid Find and Arthur, at the Battle of
Chirchind
in which Aedan was the victor and at the Battle of
Coraind
.”
¹⁶
Here were two battles: the first at
Chirchind
(that is, at Circenn-Carpow) and the second at somewhere called Coraind. This
Annal
entry fit neatly with the evidence in Geoffrey and Malory that said Camlann was not an isolated stand-alone battle.

This entry in
The Annals of Tigernach
presented a problem, however. Arthur Mac Aedan could not have died at Chirchind-Circenn
and
at the Battle of Coraind. It had to be one or the other, but which one? I thought probably the second battle, the Battle of Coraind, because it made sense to suppose that these battles were recorded in chronological order.

I was looking for the legendary Arthur’s last battle, the battle best known as Camlann, and so I supposed that if the legendary Arthur and Arthur Mac Aedan were the same person and if the legendary Arthur died at Camlann and Arthur Mac Aedan died at the Battle of Coraind,
perhaps there was evidence that the battles of Camlann and Coraind were one and the same.

By this time I was satisfied that Camlann had been fought at Camelon, Falkirk, but, this did not mean I could ignore the possibility of other evidence.
The
Annals of Ulster
corroborate
The
Annals of Tigernach
to some extent. They tell of the deaths in battle of Aedan’s sons, Bran and Domangart, in 596,
¹⁷
but, unlike
Tigernach
, they do not say Arthur and Eochaid Find died in the same battle.

In a separate entry for the same year, 596, the
Annals of Ulster
tell of, “The Battle of
Corann
.”
¹⁸
Neither of these entries mentions Arthur. Reading the
Annals of Tigernach
and of
Ulster
together makes sense of the situation. It seems there were two closely connected battles. The first battle was the Battle of Chirchind-Circenn, in which Arthur’s brothers, Bran and Domangart, were killed. The second battle was the Battle of Coraind or Corann, in which Arthur and his brother Eochaid Find were killed.
¹⁹

The
Annals of Tigernach
strongly suggest that Arthur Mac Aedan died in a battle that was the culmination of a campaign. The
Annals of Ulster
tell of more than one battle in the campaigning season of 596. These two items of evidence fit in neatly with the evidence from both Geoffrey and Malory, both of whom say that the legendary Arthur’s last battle was the culminating battle of a campaign. A campaign smacks of fact, because this is not something a commercial writer would obviously insert. A modern screenwriter, writing fiction, would probably write a dramatic, one-off last great battle. Why clutter up the big finish with more than one battle? That Geoffrey and Malory both wrote about more than one battle suggests that there was some history involved.

The evidence of the
Annals of Tigernach
and of
Ulster
and of Geoffrey and Malory are all consistent. However, I still had a problem. Geoffrey and Malory say Arthur died at the Battle of Camlann, which I had identified as Camelon, Falkirk, not at
Tigernach
’s Battle of Coraind or the
Ulster Annal
’s Battle of Corann.

It seemed likely that
Coraind
and
Corann
were corrupt versions of the same name. I put the more blunt
Corann
aside as the more corrupt version, because the suffix
aind
, the second part of the battle-name
Coraind, clearly suggested Arthur’s father, Aedan. I was sure that
Coraind
was the version I should be working with. This left the prefix
cor
requiring an explanation. At first I took
cor
to be a corruption of
carn
, meaning “a province.” This would make
Coraind
, “Aedan’s Province.” This made sense because Camelon-Camlann was in Manau where Aedan was Chief, and so Manau could reasonably be described as Aedan’s Province, but then I found a more likely meaning.

Plan from 1900–1901 excavation of Camelon Roman Fort. To the south is the trench/ditch system, the crooked ground that gave the Battle of Camlann its name
.

I knew that on General Roy’s 1793 “Plan of the Roman Fort of Camelon,” there was a place called Carmuir. This lay a few hundred feet west of the Roman fort proper. I thought that because Carmuir was near a fort (
caer
in P-Celtic) and stood on what in Scots is a
muir
(in English, “a moor”)
Carmuir
probably meant “Moor of the Fort” or “Fort of the Moor,” something like that. Given the area in question this meaning made sense.

I went further: perhaps
Coraind
did not mean “Aedan’s Province,” as I had at first supposed, but “Aedan’s Fort,”
Caer Aedan
. This made more sense, because Manau, that is, Aedan’s Province, was a relatively big place and to that extent unlikely to have been chosen as the name for a particular battle in a particular place, whereas
Coraind
, if
Coraind
meant “Aedan’s Fort,” made perfect sense, especially because it was the ninth tee on Falkirk Golf Course and so on the edge of the Roman Fort. Everything fit together.

If
Coraind
meant “Aedan’s Fort,” and if this fort lay in the shadow of the north wall of the Roman Fort at Camelon, it would have been less than 1,500 feet from the identification I had already made of the exact spot where Arthur fell in his last battle, on the crooked or twisted land that lay at the Roman Fort’s southern end. Coraind, Aedan’s Fort, is an alternative name for the Battle of Camlann.

The Mordred who appears in
Vita Merlini Silvestris
was the lord of Dunipace around the year 618, according to
Finding Merlin
. Given that Dunipace is only five miles from Camlann-Camelon and further from the heartlands of the Gododdin, it is reasonable to suppose that Mordred took control of both Dunipace and Camlann after the death of Arthur at Camlann.

T
HE
N
ECHTANSMERE
C
ONFUSION

It is not uncommon for one battle to have two names: Sharpsburg and Antietam; Manassas and Bull Run. The compilers of the Irish
Annals of Tigernach
and
Annals of
Ulster
were like the Confederates; they used the battle-name Aedan’s Fort, the P-Celtic,
Caer Aedan
. This became
Coraind
in the rendering of Q-Celtic-speaking Irish annalists and later, as the meaning of the name became even more obscure, the even more distorted
Corann
.

The people who lived near the battlefield took an opposite tack; like the Federals they stuck with the geographical name, crooked, twisted land or
Camlann
, a name that became Camelon, the modern-day name of that part of Falkirk.